SUMMARY: While many 2012 email marketing campaigns are currently underway, perhaps none is more high-profile than the U.S. presidential campaign. W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, conducted a 72-day study of four candidates' efforts to see what lessons could be learned from this complex sale process.

In this politically neutral piece, Rice identified four areas where presidential campaigns can improve their efforts, and wrote four tips based on findings that many email marketers can learn from, as well. Read on to see what he found about the candidates' opt-in processes, welcome messages, and the mix of sales vs. content messages.

In today’s blog post, I provide four examples of how not to run your email marketing, based on U.S. presidential campaigns. I will also provide four tips for the campaigns on how to improve their efforts, which I think many marketers can learn from as well. I tried to keep this blog post as politically neutral as possible, which turned out to be easier than I thought when I started since most of the efforts were pretty poor.

The 72-day study of presidential campaign email marketing

I enjoy David Meerman Scott’s use of U.S. presidential campaigns as marketing case studies in his blog posts. I agree with him that the lessons learned can be applied by all organizations. Inspired by this and with my focus on email marketing at MarketingSherpa, I signed up on March 7 to receive emails from each U.S. presidential candidate: President Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. (Please note Newt Gingrich did not provide an opportunity to register for email alerts.)

I consider the need for candidates to win over my vote for president of the United States to be a complex sale, and I correlate it with the long sales cycles of B2B organizations. After watching my inbox fill up over 72 days, here is what I discovered from my unscientific study of the candidates’ email campaigns as related to B2B email marketing best practices. Unfortunately, the experiment turned into mostly what not to do.

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